


Not a Wild Goose Chase

by NevillesGran



Series: Storm King AU [4]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Truth Serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 21:10:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4364279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to Politics, set about a year later. There were rumors of a Heterodyne in the Wastelands, persistent enough that Gil went to investigate himself. She found him.</p><p>Edit: most of this is going to be retconned eventually, whenever I get around to writing a replacement, but the gist of "Agatha kidnaps Gil and saves him" will still be true so I'll leave this up for now to reassure you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not a Wild Goose Chase

Gil woke up manacled to a cot. This was not an inherently new situation for him, though normally it was a laboratory slab and it hadn’t actually happened since Paris. Well, and two years ago in Prague, and the thing in Szebek, and that time Theo mixed—

It was a surprisingly study cot, as he soon discovered by wrapping his hands around the legs to which they were chained and attempting to subtly rock it from side to side. It seemed to be bolted down.

“Iz hyu gonna keep pretendink to be asleep, or should ve call de mistress now?”

Gil jerked up, was pulled back down by his wrists chained to the legs of the cot, and ended up looking at the ceiling of what he guessed, from the decorations and props scattered about, to be a circus wagon, as well as the curious face of what was definitely a jäger. He was about human in skin tone, but the single ram horn and exorbitant number of teeth were an obvious tip-off.

‘Mistress’? That could only be one person. This wasn’t a wild goose chase after all. Sturmvoraus would be delighted.

Seething as usual at that thought, Gil replied conversationally, “You should probably call her. Any chance I could sit up for the meeting?” He waggled his bound hands suggestively.

“Nope!” a second jäger replied with a grin. This one had purple skin. He leaned against the cot and sharpened a sword while the other darted out the door and started shouting. The sword was already quite sharp, and pointed distinctly in the direction of Gil’s head. “Ve hear hyu iz quite de shmott guy. Ve don’t vant you to be tryink anything vit de mistress.”

Yes, this would be tricky even without two very different agendas battling for supremacy in his brain. The unknown element, of course, was the Lady Heterodyne—he could banter with jägers all day, but there was every chance he could end up on the sharp end of that sword if he didn’t play this just right. Rumors hadn’t covered her policy on captured heads of state.

The door opened again and the jäger with the ram’s horn entered, followed by a vision. That is, a beautiful young woman with flowing blond hair, brilliant green eyes, clothing smudged with oil and covered in tool-bearing pockets, and a plate in her hands on which sat a piece of pie. Gil wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d last eaten, but judging by the light outside it had been most of a day. His stomach grumbled.

“Lady Heterodyne,” he said, because it could only be her. As usual, his father had been right: it _was_ the girl from Beetlesburg. “I’d get up and greet you properly, but you see to have ordered me tied down.” They had even taken the lockpicks in his sleeve, which was unfortunate.

“Herr Baron,” she replied with a nod. A third jäger followed her in, this one green, as well as a large white cat. The purple jäger hopped off Gil’s legs (also chained down, though somewhat less securely due to the difficulty of bending knees sideways) and cranked something on the underside of the cot so that it tilted him into a more upright position, then stood by the door with is fellows. The cat jumped up on a table, carelessly pushing several wooden death rays to the floor, and settled down to stare suspiciously at Gil.

“If it’s any consolation,” Lady Heterodyne continued, “I don’t really think _you_ want to attack me. But I’m also aware that you may not be acting under your own volition, and, as I don’t know what Tarvek Sturmvoraus’s plans are or what he might have ordered you to do, you’ll have to stay as you are for now.” She neatly forked a bite of pie and held it near his mouth. “Pie?”

Gil’s heart was already in his throat, and possibly his stomach as well. The headache to which he’d become accustomed grew sixfold. She _knew_. How could she possibly know? Alarm mixed with relief coursed through his body, tinged with not a small amount of sheer awe while he replied automatically, “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

I know,” she said sympathetically. But there was a slightly mad edge to it. “Don’t worry, I really _hate_ people who mess with other peoples’ minds.”

So much for Sturmvoraus’s wedding plans! Gil thought gleefully, even as he scrambled for a way to salvage the situation for the charring git. She obviously meant him no good, which meant Gil had to figure out some way to stop her, or at least get a message back to Sturmvoraus about her location, threat level, and plans. Of course, he didn’t know any of those yet. What a pity.

“Have some pie,” she said again, still holding it temptingly near his face. “Don’t worry, I have no reason to poison you right now.”

That was very much not true; he was an incredible threat, particularly when wasped. And if he really didn’t want to be trapped, he could swing sideways hard enough to yank the cot out of the wooden wagon floor (hit the Lady, get the solid cot between himself and both jägers) and break the manacles using the hyperfile on the table next to the cat.

He ate a bite of pie, and then a couple more. Lady Heterodyne was remarkably patient about feeding him like a child—though of course it was her fault he couldn’t feed himself. The pie was delicious, at least.

“What happened to my man?” he asked between bites.

Lady Heterodyne exchanged confused glances with her jägers. “Your what?”

“My, ah pilot. Higgs.” It had been the airman’s turn to keep watch, surrounded of course by all the traps Gil had set up before going to sleep. Lady Heterodyne had obviously disabled those, or just sent her jägers through them, but she seemed genuinely benevolent: it was possible that Higgs, like Gil, had been taken rather than killed. Gil certainly hoped so. He’d come to appreciate his new batman’s stoicism, though he still missed Wooster’s particular brand of British not-entirely-unflappableness.

“Oh, he’s fine,” said Lady Heterodyne. “He’s, um, tied up in a different wagon.”

“You really _are_ a good one,” Gil marveled.

“What, because I don’t kill people for no reason?” she said tartly. “No, don’t answer that.” She fed him a particularly large, crust-based bite of pie and leaned down to glare at him. “Listen, Herr Baron, I’ve _had_ people die for no reason, people I loved. **_Over and over._** And I am **_never_** _letting it happen again_. So whatever game you play, for yourself or for the Storm King, know _that_.”

“I understand.” _Wow_. Since she was clearly going to shoot Sturmvorous in the gut first chance she got (please) (he’d have to try to stop it), maybe _Gil_ could—

Priorities. Right. Ugh. Win her trust. Well, he wanted to anyway. “I’m glad. A lot of Sparks wouldn’t care like that.” _And_ she was beautiful, and clever enough to get through his traps and keep him unconscious… “If we’re going to work together, it sets a good precedent that you treat my people well.”

“You actually seem to care about him. Them.” She propped one him on the cot (her figure was amazing) and gave him another bite. The pie was nearly gone.

Gil shrugged, rattling his manacles. “It’s my job to care about people. What do you think the Baron does?”

“Takes over towns. Lets wasp engines be opened. _Fails_ to police the wastelands, so that giant scorpions and ravaging clanks and—“ she cut herself off.

Gil winced. She still remembered Beetlesburg too, and clearly hadn’t had an easy four years since. “We’re trying,” he argued. “We’ve got the last of the hive engines now.” Unless, of course, Sturmvoraus had falsified—no, Gil would give him credit on this one thing. It didn’t do _anyone_ good to have either Lucrezia’s bugs or her priestesses running about.

Except possibly this Lady Heterodyne. The geisterdamen always said their Holy Child would be able to command her mother’s creatures. Gil couldn’t ignore the possibility that her kindness was a sham.

She was rubbing her collarbone as if there used to be a necklace there, or a locket. Gil vaguely remembered seeing a Heterodyne trilobite there the last time they’d met. Except he never would have pegged her as the real thing, then: she’d been scatter-brained and clumsy, and dumped the contents of an entire closet on him. She must have had one hell of a breakthrough.

“What do you do with them?” she asked. Last piece of pie, damn.

“Burn them in situ. My father used to bring them back to the lab to experiment on, figure out how they worked. That’s how we developed the weasels, you know. Not us personally, but…” He was starting to babble. Why did beautiful, intelligent women always seem to make him babble?

He must have made some sort of face, because hers screwed up a little and she asked, “You miss him, don’t you.”

“Yeah.” It had been over a year since the Baron died and Gil still thought of him as ‘the Baron’ and himself as…not much.

“He was fighting bugs, right?”

“The last big attack.” She must know this already, if she knew about his wasp, but he kept talking anyway. “We got word that the Geisters were in Warsaw, and when we bombed the tunnels, they gave up and opened every last engine.” Except Gil hadn’t gotten word until later; he’d been on the Castle near Budapest and only come stumbling into the aftermath. Corpses everywhere, wasp and human and geisterdamen; red and silver blood mixing on the stones...even Sturmvorous had gotten a couple bad scratches. And the Baron…

“I swear Sturmvoraus engineered it somehow,” he confessed. His mind felt sticky but for once it felt _good_ to not be able to stop his tongue. “I haven’t figured out how, yet—it wasn’t his idea to go to Mechanicsburg that day, but…hey, you said the pie wasn’t drugged!”

“I said it wasn’t _poisoned_ ,” Lady Heterodyne corrected. She glanced back at her jägers. “But someone should remind me to tell Taki that his honesty pie has really come a long way.”

“Hyu gots it, Mistress,” said the green one.

Gil just beamed. Some of the euphoric feeling was definitely from whatever constituted an “honesty pie,” but he didn’t begrudge the ingenious chemical reaction. It had clearly gotten around his usual compulsion to not sabotage Sturmvoraus’s public image any more than would be usual for an on-and-off political rival. _Ha_. He wondered if—

Gil opened his mouth experimentally, but he still gagged on anything specific about being wasped, or even that Sturmvoraus had developed his own strain. That must be buried too deep, or maybe because it was a direct order rather than a general one.

“What?” demanded the Lady Heterodyne.

“I can’t say.” He grinned at her giddily. “Maybe if you gave me more honesty pie?”

She frowned. “I want to make sure there aren’t any side effects first.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t care very much about safe laboratory procedure,” he said earnestly.

A smile flickered across the Lady’s face before she schooled it into a more serious expression. She pulled over a crate or brightly colored musical instruments and sat on the edge, head level with Gil’s. “So tell me about the defenses around Mechanicsburg.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, that's Krosp. He's being stealthy.


End file.
